Archive for March, 2012

Just a brief note to say something about color music. Cuz I’ve spoken of Aleph Null, a project of mine, as one of color music.

My friend Jeremy Turner in Vancouver recently pointed out the work of Thomas Wilfred (1889-1968) to me. It wasn’t a surprise to me that somebody was doing color music back in 1917–because that sort of thing was going on, what with Theosophy and the work of people such as Kandinsky. “Synesthesia was [a] topic of intensive scientific investigation in the late 19th century and early 20th century” (Wikipedia). The idea of ‘color music’ is not a new one, certainly.

But I bring up Thomas Wilfred’s work because his understanding of ‘color music’ is especially interesting. His work was visual. It wasn’t organically linked to audio. So why did he call it color music, then, if it didn’t involve music or sound? Well, because the machines he created were like musical instruments. One played them like one played musical instruments. Musical instruments, when played, create patterned sound and we enjoy the patterned sounds of music. Wilfred’s machines, when played, produced patterned, colored light shows that were meant to be enjoyed in the same sort of way that music is enjoyed. Music is quite abstract, when there are no lyrics. It is just sound without any obvious ‘meaning’. Wilfred’s machines produced patterned light waves and color without any obvious meaning.

The New Media Writing Forum is a new hub for writers who are thinking of – or who are already – combining their work creatively with digital media.

Established by Dreaming Methods in association with Bournemouth University, the New Media Writing Prize and Crissxross (award-winning digital writer Christine Wilks), the forum encourages the sharing of ideas, techniques and resources as well as general networking and discussion.

In my generative 2d art such as Aleph Null and dbCinema, a virtual ‘brush’ moves around the screen ‘painting’. So I have need of functions that aren’t particularly predictable but buzz around the screen–and stay on screen. Ideally, they’d look like a human scrawl. Like the graphics in this article.

What I’d like to do in this article is illustrate how to use and/or create some exotic functions in your own programming work that could help you achieve a look that isn’t spirographic, ie, too orderly to be of much interest.

There’s a math theorem that says that any curve whatsoever–hand drawn or whatever–can be represented as accurately as you please with trigonometric functions. Trig functions, in the right hands, can be very expressive. Not spirographic or predictably cyclic. They can be sinuous and right there with us on the mind’s tangents. Anyone who thinks that any curve expressed by trig functions lacks the hand’s humanity just has no idea what is possible with trig functions, has no sense of the theory at all, or just hasn’t seen any good applications. Or didn’t know it when they saw it.

It’s important to note that both sin(t) and cos(t) have a maximum value of 1 and a minimum value of -1. That makes them easy to scale to take up as much or as little of the screen as we like, as we’ll see.